MoonPay: Stablecoins, Regulation & Institutional Adoption

One of our favorite all-time taking stock guests is generous enough to return once again.

Caroline Pham, Chief Legal Officer and Chief administrative officer at Moon Pay.

Thanks for joining us once again.

It's great to see you.

Thank you so much.

I love coming on the show.

I feel like every day I have to ask an expert the latest on the Clarity Act and what you're following out of Washington.

Are we finally on the verge of mainstream bank participation in the space, and you're Longtime DC veteran, what are you looking for out of this bill?

So we're definitely having, uh, banks participating in this space.

I mean, I've always said that 2026 is the year of institutional adoption.

Look, banks have been working on blockchain technology since 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and so right now with the regulatory clarity that's been in place at the agency level, that's created a great foundation for all the announcements since.

January, which is key to why we're launching Moon Pay Institutional, and then of course any additional regulatory clarity is going to be very welcome.

What other advantages out of the Clarity Act eventually passing the Senate, the House, and onto the desk of the president are you most looking forward to?

So I think what everybody's just really keen to have is a coming together of the minds and just let's all agree on what the rules of the road should be and then let's just go build.

Today was Jerome Powell's final press conference, we believe, as chairman of the central bank.

We get Kevin Warsh incoming soon.

How much does Fed leadership actually change the trajectory for the broader cryptocurrency space?

So I think the Fed leadership is going to be important for digital assets because a huge use case and value add for blockchain technology is what role it plays in collateral management for our markets.

So of course, uh, previously I had worked on the tokenized collateral guidance when I was.

At the CFTC and just having the information there about how we should treat this innovation, which is going to allow for real-time settlement, that's going to make a big difference.

Capital rules, of course, are very important for financial institutions, so the Fed definitely has a big role to play.

You and I were talking a few minutes ago there about regulations, and I wonder how you see the different approaches in terms of stable coin regulation and legislation in the US versus the EU.

If people don't follow the differences too closely, what should they know?

So I think one of the key differences. about being, uh, cognizant of for stablecoins is, look, the EU came out first with MICA.

They had a 2 year implementation period for stablecoins.

Of course, the US came out with Genius Act, and the rulemaking is going to be in place, hopefully final by the end of this year.

I think what we're going to see is a shift towards the US approach.

So it's very possible that MECA is going to have to be amended or updated to then conform with the Genius Act approach.

Oh, that's fascinating.

We'll look out for those developments and more.

I want to ask you all about Moon Pay's new Fiat to stablecoin.

Virtual offerings are stablecoins becoming more and more a bit of a checking account?

How are you approaching that conversation?

Stablecoins are not a checking account, right?

And I think this was really clear when you look at sort of the OCC proposed rule where, uh, if you have something that is a lookalike checking account, a lookalike savings account, a looking a lookalike money market fund, that's not going to be OK.

But something that's a merchant rewards program, I mean, we're used to that in financial services.

Think about your credit card rewards program, right?

Think about the miles you earn on your credit card.

Think about points that you can get, you can redeem or cashback.

All of these are really reasonable ways to think about the benefits that you could have in using stablecoins.

So I think we're really just seeing a modernization of the existing financial products that we love and use every day, you know, there's another example that I was told, which I think makes so much sense.

Stablecoins are almost like our modern day traveler's checks.

Some of your viewers may not know about traveler's checks, but back in the day you could travel anywhere in the world and you'd have traveler's checks, and it was denominated in US dollars, and that was, that was good as cash, right?

And so if you think about it.

Stablecoins are the same thing.

It's a bearer instrument.

That's also why it makes it so good for markets and for doing collateral management.

I am old enough to remember traveler's checks.

Uh, before I let you go, the acquisition of Israeli security firm Soat, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly.

What does the deal say about Moon Pay's increasing pivot to institutions, if that's the right way to frame it?

So I think what's really unique about Moon Pay is Moon Pay started from the non-custodial space and it started from DeFi.

There are a lot of people who say that DeFi is not safe and not secure, and we are.

Proof that that's just not true.

We have 30 million users in 180 countries, and when you think about that and that we do settlements in 120 different fiat currencies, we do KYC, we do transaction monitoring, we do sanction screening, and we do SARS reporting.

So by taking our strength there in DFI, for any TRAD 5 that wants to access DFI liquidity but do it safely and securely, especially with all the hacks recently in the space or people thinking about quantum computing or people thinking about anthropics mythos that was released, that is why this acquisition of.

Soda was so key for us.

Ito Sofer and his team have built such a great thing.

They have the best in class secure key management used by exchanges and trading firms all over the world eToro, Flow Traders, Flow desk, Bitco.

So we're really excited about what this means to anchor our institutional offering.

We really are bringing access to cross chain collateral mobility as well as deep high liquidity, and I was really excited all day and all week knowing that you were generous enough with your time to come back on the show.

The great Caroline fam, please come back and see us anytime.

It's nice to see you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.